Share:

A swift kick...

We had our quarterly reviews yesterday and no one was spared from a swift boot to the proverbial behind. Its an important time for us. Everyone has free reign to air any grudges and its cathartic to get this stuff out in the open. Its also very important to me as I'm a master slave driver for continuous improvement. Last year's effort/achievement of 10 becomes this year's 6. If it didn't we'd still be congratulating ourselves that we could sing the abc.

So, we now put everything Snooth has done behind us and rate it a 6. Lets see what we can do in the coming three months:

First off is Talk ! Launched last night this is Snooth's take on a forum. Our old open source forum was integrated and hosted in less than an hour, but as one of our philosophies is "web 1.5: less, but slower" this forum took us a month to build and integrate seamlessly into the site. Its unlike any forum I've ever seen so I encourage you to take a look at version 1.0 of our take on the format.

Secondly, search. Our faithful servers are pushing out 1 million searches a month now. We're going to be doing some fantastic stuff here over the coming weeks. Its all hush hush at the moment, but we're integrating massive amounts of data and will do some smart filtering to to display more and more relevant results - particularly in terms of showing you relevant merchants who can actually get the product to you.

There's some other stuff of course, but this is what I wanted to highlight. We're closing on our first full year of operations and beginning to find our groove. We're proud to be a part of this industry and hope you'll be with us for some time. For us, its Wine Friday and today's bottle is Cantele Primitivo Salento 2005 . Now go check out Talk !

PS. To those that experienced a Snooth without search (server death) the other day, I apologize for what must have seemed a fairly pointless site! We weren't expecting 19,457 people in such a short time span. However, we were back within the hour and no data was lost.

Jake - fair point. I try to couch it in terms of "look what we can achieve together" and trying to get people to reach their potential, rather than "you suck, do better". But its a fine line...

Blog comment by chris, Mar 4, 2008.

Jake - I don't think anyone walked away from the reviews with the impression that their best wasn't good enough. On the contrary, everyone here seemed to show greater motivation and enthusiasm after they took place. We can always do better, and it's important that we know how we can improve, and sort of dust out the closet. It's a tightrope walk, as Philip suggests, and you fall to your death if you lean too much either way.

Of course, I was sick, and didn't get reviewed yet, so perhaps me glasses got a bit o' rose in em. I'm still freakin' stoked to work here.